Job 6:2 Meaning Oh That My Anguish Were Weighed

Dukkha: Suffering Dukkha is the first of the four truths, the load that has to be known in full before anything else is done about it. Calling for scales is asking that the load be entered at its full weight, which is precisely what Eliphaz has just refused by treating the sores as a lesson. Weighing comes before diagnosis on this path as well: the burden is set down and looked at squarely before a word is said about its cause.

Salla: The dart Salla is the second wound, the mind's reaction landing on top of the body's pain. Boils and ashes are one dart; having the cry heard as an argument to be corrected is the dart that goes deeper, and that second one is what tips the pan past the sand of the seas. A man can carry sores he scrapes with a potsherd; the crushing weight is carrying them while his word is doubted.

Māna: Measuring Māna is the habit of measuring oneself, and the root of the word is the weighing itself. Once a balance is called for, the reading wanted is heavier than anyone's, since a grief ranked ordinary would hand the friends their case. Grief placed in a class of its own puts the sufferer out of reach of the very people sitting in the dust beside him.

Kamma: Action and its fruit Kamma covers deeds and their results, and the Buddha rejected the view that everything a person feels traces back to what that person did. Eliphaz already has his balance out, sin in one pan and sores in the other, and that tidy accounting is what forces the demand for a fairer set. Illness, weather, and the hands of other people all press down on a life, so reading a man backward from his wreckage gets the sum wrong.

Karuṇā: Compassion Karuṇā is the heart's trembling at another's pain. It comes before any reading is taken off the scale, which is why the seven silent days were the best thing these three friends ever did for him. Sitting close and granting that the calamity is heavy because he says it is heavy would settle the question the scales were called in to decide.